One of the more difficult parables of Jesus is the parable of the wedding feast in Matthew 22:1-14. It begins with a king sending out invitations to his son’s wedding (twice), but when the invited guests refuse to come to the wedding and mistreat the king’s messengers the king sends his troops to destroy their city. He then instructs his servants to invite all and sundry, ‘good and bad,’ to the wedding. There is a strange twist at the end when the king notices someone at the wedding feast who was not appropriately dressed and he instructs his servants to “bind him hand and foot, and throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” It certainly is a strange parable.
A ‘traditional’ interpretation of the parable is to treat it as an allegory: the king is God, his son is Jesus, the wedding feast is the eschatological banquet which represents (in apocalyptic language) the kingdom of God, the people initially invited to the wedding but who declined the invitation are the Jews, the ‘all and sundry’ who are subsequently invited are the Gentiles who convert to Christianity, and the city which is destroyed is Jerusalem (destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE). This interpretation, however, poses several problems.
First, it is anti-Jewish, and this is uncharacteristic of the Gospel of Matthew. Second, it makes God to be an angry tyrant who forces people to do his bidding. Third, it offers no explanation for why the guests who were initially invited turned down the invitation. Fourth, it leaves unexplained the problem of who the person is who is inappropriately dressed and what this means as part of the allegory.
A better explanation, in my view, is one recently offered by Marie Hause.1 Hause reads this parable against the background of of the Roman occupation of Judea and in the context of other sayings by Jesus in Matthew’s Gospel about non-resistance to violence. She thinks that the king in the parable represents the tyrannical and exploitative rule of the Romans, forcing the occupied Judeans to do their bidding and to accept their legitimacy. Those who rejected this authority through violent means (depicted as beating the king’s servants in the parable) paid a heavy price for their violent resistance to oppression with destruction of towns and cities and mass crucifixions. The ‘good and bad’ who were later invited to the wedding represent those who did not resist and may even have benefitted from collaboration with the Romans (such as the religious leadership). The guest who refused to wear appropriate clothing constitutes a passive non-violent challenge to the king’s authority. He is thrown out of the wedding, but not killed like the initial invitees who resisted with violence. He is actually the central character of the parable. Hause argues that “even though the wedding guest is ejected from the hall, through his liminal action he succeeds in refusing to support the king without participating in a further injustice like the killing of the slaves.”
This interpretation is consistent with the emphasis in Matthew’s Gospel on nonviolent resistance to domination and is in line with Jesus’ sayings about turning the other cheek and walking two miles when a Roman soldier has conscripted you to walk one. In Matthew 5:39 Jesus says “if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also.” Unlike Luke’s version which has “if anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also,” Matthew explicitly mentions being struck on the right cheek – a back-handed slap or insult – followed by turning the left cheek, inviting a close-fisted punch. Jesus could either be saying “if someone insults you, you may as well invite them to punch you, because oppression always gets worse”, or “if someone abuses you take some nonviolent action which exposes their exploitation.” In Hause’s words, “the guest’s refusal to wear a wedding robe passively and silently but powerfully denounces oppression by refusing to celebrate it.”
I personally find this explanation convincing, as it removes the difficulties in the ‘traditional’ explanation and provides an explanation which is consistent with the emphasis of Matthew’s Gospel.
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- Hause, Marie. “The Parable of the Wedding Protest: Matthew 22:1–14 and Nonviolent Resistance,” Pages 49-61 in The (De)Legitimization of Violence in Sacred and Human Contexts. Edited by Muhammad Shafiq and Thomas Donlin-Smith. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2021. Hause acknowledges that her interpretation is influenced by the earlier work by Herzog, William R., Parables as Subversive Speech: Jesus as Pedagogue of the Oppressed. Louisville, Ky: Westminster John Knox Press, 1994.
Thanks Stephen for this post, and for sharing Marie Hause’s novel interpretation of the parable of Matthew 22:1-14.
Biblical interpreters have a responsibility to be sensitive to the sordid history of anti-Semitism and religious violence and thus to avoid providing fodder for such distortions of the Christian message. My own view, however, is that this responsibility does not apply to historical-critical interpretation of the text, but only to moral/theological application. The purpose of the former is to identify the author’s intended meaning in his own historical context. Inferring moral and theological implications is then a separate and subsequent activity.
With that in mind, while Hause’s interpretation seems to address some of the moral and theological problems presented by this text, in my view it is exegetically unconvincing.
Observe, firstly, that from Matthew 21:23 through chapter 23, the narrative zeroes in on the conflict between Jesus and certain Jewish religious and political elites (the chief priests and elders; the scribes and Pharisees; the Herodians; the Sadducees). Prior to the parable in Matthew 22:1-14, we have: (i) the chief priests and elders challenging Jesus’ authority; (ii) the parable of the two sons, which Jesus explicitly interprets as distinguishing between the chief priests and elders, on the one hand, and “tax collectors and prostitutes” who enter the kingdom of God before them; (iii) the parable of the tenants, which Jesus again interprets as a judgment on the chief priests and elders, that the kingdom will be taken from them and given to a people that will produce its fruit (Matt. 21:43, 45).
The parable of the wedding feast & garment follows immediately. While little editorial comment accompanies this “double parable,” it is said to be spoken “in reply…to them” (chief priests and Pharisees) and is followed immediately by the Pharisees going off to plot against Jesus. So there are abundant external clues that the parable is intended as a judgment on the chief priests and Pharisees, the religious elites who reject Jesus.
Now to the content of the parable itself. Most scholars agree that this parable is based on the parable of the banquet in Luke 14:15-24. Following the usual two-source hypothesis, this parable derives from Q. Luke’s version is much simpler and thus probably nearer the Q source. In Luke’s version, there is simply a man who gives a great dinner. The original guests decline the invitation, which is then extended to others instead. No violence. In Matthew’s version, a king gives a banquet for his son. Elsewhere in Matthew, the king in the parable of Matthew 18:23-35 is unambiguously God, while the king’s son—who plays no active role in this parable—is best understood as God’s Son, the Messiah (Matt. 3:17; 16:16; 17:5; etc.) As for the wedding feast, Jesus will use the same setting in an obviously eschatological sense for the parable of the ten virgins in Matthew 25. The contextual evidence supports the idea that the wedding feast for the king’s son corresponds allegorically to the eschatological kingdom of God.
The violent elements of the parable—in which some guests do not merely decline the invitation but kill the king’s servants, and are themselves destroyed—seems to be an assimilation of this parable’s narrative to the previous (the parable of the tenants). Many scholars see in the detail that the king “burned their city” a redactional allusion to the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 C.E. The message seems to be that the chief priests and Pharisees rejected the prophetic message about the kingdom of heaven, and consequently were punished while others—including Matthew’s community of Jesus-followers—accepted the message.
This is not an anti-Jewish polemic, but an inner-Jewish polemic. The only explicit contrast between people groups in the context is between the chief priests and elders vs. the prostitutes and tax collectors (all Jews).
To Matthew’s first-century auditors, for the king to react by “destroying the murderers” would have been expected. Indeed, the Q&A in 21:40-41 shows that Jesus’ audience agreed that “a wretched death” was a suitable penalty for murder. So while the parable’s violence might be shocking to modern ears, ancient hearers/readers would not have heard the parable and said, “This king is an angry tyrant.” They would have said, “The king avenges the innocent and punishes the guilty, as he should.”
As for the epilogue about the man without a wedding garment, this is probably intended as a warning to those within Matthew’s community that simply belonging to the eschatological community is not sufficient; one must wear the garment of repentance (cf. Matt. 7:21). The sentence passed on this man is emphatically NOT a lesser sentence than being killed. Being thrown into the darkness outside, where there is wailing/weeping and grinding of teeth, is distinctive Matthaean language for eschatological punishment (Matt. 8:12; 13:42; 13:50; 24:51; 25:30). For Matthew, the eschatological punishment is worse than a miserable execution (18:6); worse than never having existed (26:24).
Hi Thomas, and thanks for your comments. I’m a biblical scholar rather than a theologian and I agree with Marie Hause’s interpretation on historical/critical grounds rather than moral/theological grounds. In the literary context of Matthew’s Gospel it’s the interpretation which makes the most sense to me. Here are my brief comments on the issues you’ve raised.
1. I’m not sure that “most scholars agree that this parable is based on the parable of the banquet in Luke 14:15-24 … [and] derives from Q”. The scholarly consensus seems to be that Q is a collection of wisdom sayings, and even if we allow for later additions to the sayings there is no consensus that it included parables such as this one. The substantial differences between the wedding banquet parables in Matthew and Luke suggest to me that they derived from another source, or sources, rather than Matthew re-working Luke. The two-source hypothesis is hotly debated, as you know, and I think the idea that Matthew used Luke as a source is still a minority view. However, even if we accept for the sake of the argument that Matthew and Luke used the same source for this parable, we have no way of knowing its original form. If Matthew adapted Luke’s parable we have to ask what could be the intended purpose for the inclusion of the violence and the wedding garment scene. In its immediate context, directed to the chief priests and pharisees (21:45), I think Hause’s explanation makes the best sense: the parable exposed their collaboration with the Romans as motivated by self-gain and ultimately futile. The sequence of parables seems to be directed more at their greed and desire for wealth, power and influence than at their theology.
2. I agree with you that in the context of Matthew “this is not an anti-Jewish polemic, but an inner-Jewish polemic.” It is unfortunate that it has been used otherwise by supersessionists.
3. I accept that your final paragraph reflects a traditional interpretation. However, it poses the problem that with this interpretation the parable has no single focus and the twist towards the guest takes the spotlight away from the intended target (those who rejected the invitation) and re-directs it to an altogether different target (those whose conversion was insincere). Hause’s reading has a more consistent internal logic, in my view.
Thanks for sharing this interpretation. It makes more sense to me as a culturally appropriate narrative. I was never happy with all the violence apparently perpetrated by God, and then the guy chucked out at the end for inappropriate garments?Wendy
Dr Wendy A. Johnsen Palliative Care Physician MB ChB, CCFP (PC), MA Theological StudiesCentral Island Division of Family Practice, Board Co-chair
“Each one should use whatever gift he has received to serve others, faithfully administering God’s grace in its various forms.” 1 Pet 4:10
Thanks for your comment Wendy. I think a misreading of this parable has led to stereotypes about God being violent and demanding, or that God is never satisfied with human responses, as well as anti-Jewish tropes. Marie Hause’s explanation is much more satisfying to me because it flows logically and there are no lose ends.